free republic's 3-day standoff with teh interwebs continues..

the redirect with useful info about johnbob's epic journey to San Josey to kickstart the db server won't even load! I haven't had an opportunity to check the facebooks to read jimmyrobby's latest missive from the FR compound, but freepers must be in full blown defcon 1 panic mode, what with their sore knees and chapped hands from all that praying. some may even be coming here to get caught up on the day's events. please keep these poor souls in your thoughts and prayers. FR withdrawal symptoms are as bad or even worse than those one might experience when trying to kick cigs or meth.

13. They still have Sludge Report. nt

33. the sludge

and faux nation which is little more than freeper lite. Then there's always the blahz- Glennda the Beckerhead's billboard.Wingnut world has a multitude of communications channels.It's a necessity when you've got to keep folks in lockstep.

84. No kidding?

89. As I said I wouldn't normally go there

but since the subject was raised here I had a quick root around. They seem to have set up a temporary site on Yahoo and there was mention of the absense of a back up there. "Whoever" is attempting to retrieve the files - whatever that means.

92. Thanks. Could be. Their logic is incomprehensible:

Freepers Freak Out Over Obama Win, Pen Letter Asking the Queen of England to 'Take Us Back'

'...But nowhere was the post-election butthurt more palpable than on Free Republic, that bastion of children-bashing "freedom fighters," where an open letter was posted shortly after Obama reelection, apologizing to the Queen of England for "that little misunderstanding we had 236 years ago," and asking the British Empire to "take us back..."

Your Majesty,

We, the people of the former American colonies, would like to offer our most sincere apology over that little misunderstanding we had 236 years ago. Had we known that we were going to be subjects anyway, we could have saved a lot of trouble and hard feelings.

We were under the mistaken belief that we would be free, sovereign citizens; we believed that our hard work would yield its own rewards without someone coming along and taking what we built in the name of "Fairness". We thought our laws and Constitution would protect us from a foreign born dictator, and our freedom to worship would prevent us from becoming a corrupt, morally bankrupt society (silly us).

Little did we know that our own free press would intentionally sabotage, deceive and withhold the truth from us in order to reelect a Socialist that still holds distain for our nation and contempt for its founding principles. Nor did we believe that there would be so many citizens dependent on government handouts that they would blindly elect an unqualified charlatan, let alone reelect him.

Anyway, Your Grace, we are truly sorry and humbly sincerely beg your forgiveness. If you can find it in your heart to forgive us and take us back, we promise never to trade British oppression for Socialist tyranny again.

Your most humble servants,

The American People

The Left has already taken the liberty of issuing a response to the Freepers on behalf of the Queen in the form of (what else?) an animated GIF':

8. That's what happens with old, outdated websites

All that money he's taken in over the years and the site still uses obsolete forum software on shotty servers. There's no way that the donations are used to maintain the site, if there was, it would show. The members are too stupid to wonder why they have nothing to show for thousands and thousands in dollars of donations over the span of years.

9. Hundreds of thousands in donations

over the years and it's still the same crappy website. The rubes there get fleeced every quarter and are only now realizing they've been snookered. P.T. Barnum was right about suckers - there's a whole website inhabited by them right there having to rely on listening to rush limpo to know what to think.

12. Here's the latest from their Facebook group...

Latest update from John as of approx 11:00 pm PST 2/20/13: Still working on the new system. Then he's got to figure a way to get the data off the old system and onto the new. Say's he's cobbling together a Frankenstein SCSI box out of our old servers to get the job done. Then he'll have to do a consistency test which takes hours. Could be up tomorrow afternoon if no more problems pop up.

Praying for the best.

Thank you very much for your patience.

Very sorry about the downtime.

Lots of questions being asked about whether proper back-ups were being done.

14. If only RIMJOB had listened to Stephaine Miller, he'd have a CARBONITE backup ready to go!!!

17. Carbonite advertises on HanNutty and PedoRush too. I don't think they do TRS-80 though. Looks like

RimJob and his crew will probably have to make an attenuator to adjust the gain on their TRS-80's cassette drive. They called and asked me for the schematic and I snail-mailed it to them because you know... they don't have a fax machine.

Or they can get the expansion package with a 5.25" floppy drive and an upgrade to 42kb of RAM. I've heard they've been trying to call Tandy Corp for days and haven't gotten an answer.

15. Yuk,yuk,yuk! No really, guys, stay offline as long as it takes and I'd really use as much ....

Frankenstein seat of your pants tech as possible. I've got and idea: it utilizes Coca-Cola and a lot of high voltage but if you're really desperate you can forgo the latex food handler gloves. Just move fast. Very fast. Or not.

20. "Praying for the best." Yea because all God has to do

this week is deal with freeperville's hardware problems. If God isn't too busy sitting on John's shoulder supervising the hack job he's doing, perhaps He could look into Rimjob reaming his followers for $350K per year.

28. My BBS was mainly a support BBS for

my little shareware software company. Its users spanned the globe. The PC that ran it was in a room that was sometimes a bedroom, too. It was interesting to sleep there. That old Seagate 80 MB drive's read/write head servo made a chuckling sound when it was seeking. It used to wake whoever was sleeping there constantly. And you really could heat coffee on it. I had the PC's cover off to help keep it cool.

I was running four modems on it, connected to phone lines at the lowest possible basic billing rate, since they were answer only. That BBS kept all four lines off-hook at least 50% of the time. Poor Ma Bell!

The message system got lots of use, too, and even had a political forum area and a live chat area. I didn't take the system down until 1999. After I did, I kept getting Internet email wanting to know when it would be back on line.

101. I Found A Copy Of Major BBS...

...from around 1994...the "Rolls Royce" of BBS software. I helped sysop a BBS...we had 16 nodes at 28kbaud and it was rockin' and rollin' 24/7 for the two years I had it running. We ran it on a 486 with a "monster" 1 gig hard drive and 2 whole meg of memory...connected to a tape back-up and it still crashed. LOL.

I moved over to HTML and the www in Fall '96. The BBS days were the wild west...had a lot of fun...

98. I am,...fragging fuckwits is my favorite RPG.

18. I have a solution for those morans.

All they need is a PC running MS-DOS 3.1, a copy of the last version of the Mustang's Wildcat! BBS that supports multiple modems, and they can go back on line as the "Premier Conservative BBS" on the planet. The current software is dial-up ready, and it's perfect for a BBS.

If you're going to use 80s technology, you might as well go full dial-up access.

Another advantage: The Huge 80 Megabyte Seagate full-height hard drive in your PC AT clone can be used to keep your coffee hot through the entire day!

105. We will have to sit back and wait. It will self destruct.

106. From the look of the site, and if it's true it's only 300 members, it already has. Jim's kingdom is

a shadow of its former self in forming any sort of conservative opinion.

They cut off their noses to spite their faces. No one wanted their increasingly narrow view of America. All they've got left is fomenting sedition or going to live under theocratic rule managed by armed patriots in small enclaves.

107. Maybe FR is just reflecting the rigid authoritarianism in the TP/GOP.

108. That would explain their behaving as if JR is a father figure. He's abusive in his rants to his own

members, demands instant obediance to his will even when he contradicts himself, and they lap it up from him, acting rather childish and dependent on his fickle approval.

They have to agree to hate whoever he calls the enemy of his world view, but he changes it and won't allow any dissent. Like a dysfunctional family, they think they can't survive without it.

It's classic cult technique, like Beck and Fox, inoculating, keeping them in a state of low-level anxiety all the time, often hiding behind religious themes. When it's really about the money, all the time. They think of JR as a suffering working class stiff who cares about them if they toe the line.

It's pure nutsoville over there.

I suspect you've already read it, but if not, download The Authoritarians by Bob Altemeyer.

It describes this method of control and just how dangerous it can be. If you haven't read it, you can download it and a few other good reads on the subject for free at the link below. There are audio versions available, as well:

113. I read "Conservatives Without Conscience" by John Dean. Much of it was drawn from

115. I read that too, it was chilling, also 'Worse than Watergate' in which he combined both presidents.

That was written during the Bush years and I found it so horrifying that I could hardly do more than skim through, just the chapter titles resonated with me so deeply. Powerful book and I consider Dean to have been a strong person for publishing it then.

45. what happened to tehstupidbook?

47. Aren't the Koch brothers withdrawing

funding from people and groups they deem unworthy now? Is if a coincidence that FR goes down about the same time? I don't have any idea if it is connected nor do I really care but just questions that come to mind.